Technology continues to grow closer and closer to our bodies, from the phones in our pockets to the smart watches on our wrists. Now it's getting under some people's skin.

In Sweden, a country rich with technological advancement, thousands have had microchips inserted into their hands.

The chips are designed to speed up users' daily routines and make their lives more convenient — accessing their homes, offices and gyms is as easy as swiping their hands against digital readers.

To explain why he grows coca, the raw material for cocaine, rather than food crops on his 5-acre farm in southern Colombia, Luis Tapia does the math.

Every three months, Tapia, 60, harvests the bright green coca leaves with his bare hands, then mixes them with gasoline, sulfuric acid and other chemicals to make coca paste. He then sells the paste to drug traffickers who turn it into powder cocaine. A pound of paste, he says, sells for more than one ton of corn.

"That's why everyone grows coca," Tapia says.

Beirut's Zach Condon is a magpie for sounds, collecting left-behind instruments and equipment from around the world. Condon can't explain what drove him from his hometown in New Mexico or his studio in Berlin to record Beirut's new album, Gallipoli in rural Italy, but he's the first to own up to "reading too many Tin Tin books" and having a childhood obsession with Indiana Jones. From halfway around the world, Condon, in this conversation, walked All Songs Considered's Bob Boilen through the experience that inspired Gallipoli's title track.